[Discussion] Type type

How do you handle Pokemon types in your fanfics? Do you have any narrative justifications for how they work? Do you add new ones? Ignore them?

Considering Foul Play is about two dark-type trainers, dark-type does play a big role here haha. There was a brief mention over the scientific reason behind why many trainers specialize a type. As for adding new ones, nope I just go with whatever types we have. While I haven't done it yet, there is the possibility of adding new type combinations we haven't seen yet.

Since I'm writing a Genshin fanfiction, I have to work with Elemental Reactions and the seven visions which is similar to the eighteen Pokemon types. And I have to take into account how they react to one another.

For Pokemon, I'd have to do something similar and I'd describe how types work in relation to one another.

I don't think I'd do fan-made types, though, in either Pokemon or Genshin. I'm creative, but I don't feel like making a whole ass new type and relating it back to the Pokemon type chart... leave that to the romhackers.

I don't really carry around a concept of how much "health" my characters have in a fight, so I try to keep my type advantages a little more subtle and grounded than "this attack hurts me twice as much as other attacks do." A fire attack's effects on a grass type are clear, but, for instance, maybe a water attack makes it harder for a fire type to use fire-based attacks, or maybe it saps their energy away more than it would for someone else. (Ever try jogging while wearing a jacket soaked with water?) Maybe bugs, darkness, and ghosts make it hard you, a psychic type, to focus on your attacks.

On a related note, I like to run on a policy of "Pokemon can learn four explicit moves, and then can also freely do anything their biology or types imply." No pokemon needs to use up an imaginary move slot on Scratch, no fire type needs to know a special move to set things on fire, but if a move feels more like a technique, or it lies outside their expected skillset (usually because of a type mismatch), then I mentally tally that against the imaginary four-move-limit.